Death of a Bore (7 page)

‘I’m anxious to get started.’

‘You cannae miss seeing this.’ Jimmy slotted in a video. ‘Sit yourself down, laddie, and be prepared for the show of the century.’

The windswept waterfront with the police mobile unit appeared. ‘This is an amateur video from Mr Patel,’ said Jimmy. ‘The press were all in the pub at the beginning of the
action.’

Hamish saw the mobile police unit begin to rock dangerously. The door opened and the Currie sisters hurtled out. The wind propelled them at great speed along the waterfront. Then there was an
almighty roar, and the camera swung to catch a black funnel racing down the loch. Hamish watched, fascinated, as the mobile unit was lifted up like a toy and thrown into the loch. Then he
recognized Alistair Taggart running across the road.

The camera work became more expert as the Strathbane cameraman took over. Jimmy and Hamish watched as Blair was rescued. Then the scene switched to the pub, and there was Alistair Taggart.
‘His obsession for his writing must have taken over from his obsession with the booze,’ commented Hamish. Alistair’s normally drink-swollen face was lean and craggy. Alistair made
his statement about being a writer and then shrugged off praise from Jessma on his bravery. Then the camera swung to show a shot of a wet and miserable Blair wrapped in blankets.

Jimmy switched off the video. ‘It’s a pity the auld bastard didn’t drown. Let’s go.’

Down in Edinburgh, literary agent Blythe Summer was giving last-minute instructions to his secretary. ‘You hold the fort while I’m away. If I can sign up this
Gaelic writer, I think we might make a killing.’

His secretary, Maggie Gillespie, looked doubtful. ‘Who on earth can read Gaelic today?’

‘Oh, it’s become a sort of cult. There are classes all over the place now. There’s a hotel up there. Book me in.’

Hamish had been at Strathbane Television before during a murder investigation. As he and Jimmy walked through the doors, he felt as he had felt before: that they were entering
some sort of closed world. He knew the executive staff had all been changed since the last takeover.

At the desk they asked to speak to Harry Tarrant, the drama executive, and were told to take a seat and wait.

‘The higher up they are,’ said Hamish gloomily, ‘the longer you have to wait. Have you seen
Down in the Glen
, Jimmy? Oh, I forgot. They usually only show sports in
pubs.’

‘I don’t spend my life in pubs,’ said Jimmy. ‘Man, I thought you’d be in a better humour after seeing that video.’

Hamish shrugged. ‘I don’t know what it is about this place, but it gives me the creeps. Maybe it’s because there are so many egos bottled up in the same building.’

‘Come on, you crabbit copper. I thought that Jessma Gardener was pretty nice.’

‘Maybe.’

A secretary approached them and said in accents of stultifying gentility, ‘Mr Terrent will see you now.’

‘I thought his name was Tarrant,’ said Hamish maliciously.

She did not deign to reply but led them through double glass doors to a lift, ushered them in and pressed the button for the fifth floor. On the fifth floor they followed her through a long
corridor to a door at the end. She knocked. A voice said, ‘Come!’

I hate people who say ‘Come,’ thought Hamish.

She opened the door. ‘The pelice er heah, Mr Terrent.’

A small man with a large black beard stood up from behind a massive desk. ‘That will be all, Miss Patty. Oh, wait a minute. I am sure the gentlemen would like some coffee.’

‘Please,’ said Jimmy.

‘Good, good. Sit down. Two coffees, Miss Patty.’

‘What ever happened to women’s lib?’ asked Hamish when Miss Patty had retreated. ‘I thought it was no longer politically correct to order secretaries to fetch
coffee.’

‘Bugger political correctness,’ said Harry. ‘That’s all old hat. Women have finally woken up to the fact that they are subservient. Now, how can I help you? Is it about
poor John?’

‘It appears he was murdered,’ said Jimmy. ‘We wondered if he had bad relations with anyone here.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Harry. ‘We are one big happy family here. How can you even think such a thing? You saw the hate in those villagers’ faces.’

‘Aye,’ said Hamish. ‘But you see, I know these villagers very well, and I cannot think one of them could commit such an elaborate murder.’

‘You keep calling it murder,’ said Harry. ‘Last heard, poor John had left a suicide note.’

‘We believe he was murdered with naphthalene,’ said Hamish.

‘What’s that?’

‘You get it from mothballs.’

‘Then it must have been someone in Lochdubh. The whole place is mothballed. I went there once and I thought, set your watch back one hundred years.’

The door opened and Miss Patty came in carrying a tray with coffee jug, milk and sugar, and cups.

‘Anyway,’ went on Harry, ‘I simply cannot believe that anyone would want to murder John Heppel.’

Miss Patty dropped the tray with a crash. Milk and coffee spilled over the carpet.

‘You stupid girl,’ roared Harry. ‘Clean that mess up and get out of here! No, on second thought, leave it until the police have left.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ wailed Miss Patty.

‘Sod off,’ said Harry brutally.

He turned to Jimmy and Hamish. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes, John. He was working on a script for us for
Down in the Glen.
Magnificent stuff. He was working on a second draft because the
director wanted a few changes.’

‘Who is the director?’ asked Hamish.

‘An English chap called Paul Gibson.’

‘May we speak to him?’

‘Not today. He’s up round John O’Groat’s way. On location.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Hamish produced a card. ‘Would you please ask him to phone me? And I would like to see the script.’

Harry buzzed his secretary. When she appeared, Hamish noticed she had been crying. ‘Get me John Heppel’s script for
Down in the Glen
,’ ordered Harry.

‘Mr Gibson has it with him.’

‘What’s he doing carrying it around?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’

‘Okay, get lost. I’ll call you.’

Miss Patty went out.

‘Was it a good script?’ asked Hamish while Jimmy threw him a bored look, wondering at all the questions.

‘As I said, it was magnificent. I tell you, he had the right idea. Just because it’s a soap doesn’t mean that we can’t have a literary script.’

‘And what was the plot?’ asked Hamish.

For the first time, Harry looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, it was about a murder.’

‘Describe it.’

‘There’s this brilliant writer, and all the other writers are jealous of him and he begins to receive death threats. He moves to the Highlands and falls in love with Annie, one of
our main characters, who is being raped by the laird. It looks like suicide because the gun is found in his hand.’

‘How original,’ said Hamish dryly. ‘I’ll bet someone noticed he was left-handed but the gun was in his right hand.’

‘How did you guess?’

‘Just intuition,’ said Hamish sarcastically.

‘Anyway, the writing was pure Dostoyevsky.’

‘You mean the man who wrote
The Idiot
?’

‘Amazing. A learned policeman.’

Hamish had actually only read the title in the local mobile library when he was searching for a detective story.

‘And you can’t think of anyone here who might hate him?’

‘No one at all.’

‘Did you commission him to write a script, or did he approach you?’

‘I had known him before.’ Harry looked uneasy. ‘We were friends in our youth in Glasgow.’

‘In the slums?’

‘Well, now, John was indulging in a little bit of exaggeration there. He was actually brought up in Bearsden.’

‘That’s pretty posh.’

‘You see, working class is all the thing these days. If a writer comes from a cosy background and starts writing a book set in the slums, people might think he didn’t know what he
was writing about.’

‘Did he always write?’

‘He always tried.’

‘What was he doing when you knew him?’

‘He was an income tax inspector.’

‘That’s enough to get anyone murdered,’ said Jimmy.

‘My friend is dead,’ said Harry coldly. ‘I don’t like your tone.’

‘Who was he in contact with here apart from you?’ asked Hamish.

‘He had consultations with the director and the script editor.’

‘And who is the script editor?’

‘Sally Quinn.’

‘May we speak to her?’

‘I’ll get Miss Patty to take you to her. Now I have work to do.’ He buzzed for his secretary.

As Miss Patty led them to a staircase leading to the floor below, Hamish studied her with new interest. She was a small faded woman, possibly in her late thirties, with dull sandy hair and a
pinched white face. Hamish felt suddenly sorry for her. She should have been secretary to a bank manager or had some sort of job away from this brutal world where she might get a bit of respect.
Yet some people would put up with a lot to think they were part of show business.

‘In here,’ said Miss Patty, pushing open a door. ‘Selly, pelice to see you.’

Sally was a tall, angular woman with frizzy grey hair and pale eyes behind thick glasses. ‘I wish that silly cow would stop calling me Selly,’ she said. ‘It’s the old
Kelvinside accent. You hardly hear it these days. You’ve come about John’s death?’

‘Did you think his script had merit?’ asked Hamish.

‘Brilliant stuff. Never seen anything like it,’ said Sally to the window.

‘Did everyone here like him?’

‘Of course. Sweet man,’ Sally told the coffee pot on her desk.

‘Why isn’t there a copy of the script here?’

‘Paul Gibson took all the copies with him on location. It wasn’t quite finished, and so he thought he’d go over it while he was away. He’ll be back tomorrow.’

Jimmy’s phone rang. He took it out and moved to a corner of the room. Hamish heard his exclamation of surprise and then ‘Right, sir.’

Jimmy rang off and turned to Hamish. ‘Developments. We’ve got to go.’

They thanked Sally and walked outside.

‘What?’ asked Hamish.

‘Blair has arrested Alistair Taggart for the murder.’

The message they received when they arrived back at police headquarters was that Jimmy was to go immediately upstairs to join Blair and that Hamish Macbeth was to get back to
his beat.

Hamish drove straight to Lochdubh, parked the Land Rover, collected Lugs, and walked up to Alistair Taggart’s cottage. He knocked on the door. Maisie Taggart answered. Her eyes were red
with crying, and she hugged her thin figure.

‘He didnae do it,’ she said on a choked sob.

‘Can I come in?’

She nodded and turned away. He followed her into their living room. A battered typewriter stood on a desk in the corner with a pile of typescript beside it. I wonder where folks get ribbons for
those things today, thought Hamish, what with most people using computers.

He took off his cap and sat down. Lugs slumped in a corner and went to sleep.

‘Why do they think he did it?’ asked Hamish.

‘Thon Perry Sutherland says he saw Alistair up at John’s cottage the night he was killed.’

‘And why didn’t Perry say this before?’

‘He said he didn’t want Alistair to get into trouble. Then that nasty fat detective kept shouting at him and accusing Perry of the murder, and that’s when Perry said he’d
seen Alistair.’

‘Did they search your house? Did they find anything incriminating?’

‘They found a packet of mothballs.’

‘I’ve got a packet of mothballs. I think everyone in Lochdubh has a packet of mothballs. Why did Alistair say he was visiting John?’

‘He went to get the money back he’d paid for the writing class.’

‘And did he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he drinking?’

‘No, he’s sworn off. He just writes and writes. Drives me mad. At least when he was on the drink, he would pass out sooner or later and give me a bit o’ peace. Anyway,
I’ve had enough of him. I’m off to my sister in Oban.’

‘But if they haven’t any hard evidence, it’ll never get to court and he’ll be released.’

‘Well, I won’t be here waiting for him – him and his writing.’

‘Surely that’s better than the drink.’

A mulish look settled on her weak face.

Hamish repressed a sigh. He’d seen cases like this so many times before. The woman prays and prays that her man will give up the bottle, and when he does, she leaves him and usually moves
in after a while with another drunk. These women had the awful craving to be needed, even if it meant lying for the drunk and cleaning up after him.

‘You’d better give me your address in Oban,’ he said.

‘Why? Alistair’s got nothing to do with me any more.’

Hamish said patiently, ‘The police will want to interview you further. Don’t you have to make a statement?’

‘I’ve already talked to that fat bully. I told him Alistair went out at five and came back at six.’

‘Give me the address anyway.’

She told him her sister’s address, and he wrote it carefully in his notebook.

‘And what about your son, Dermott? Won’t he be upset at being taken out of school?’

‘No, he says he’ll be glad to get away as well.’

Outside, Hamish said to Lugs, ‘We’re off to Cnothan. If Perry saw him, maybe someone else saw him and heard something.’

He drove off to Cnothan, and as he was driving through that dreary village, he saw one of those itinerate door-to-door salesmen who sell dusters and brushes and stuff for the kitchen. He stopped
the Land Rover and got out.

The salesman, a shabby young man, was just leaving one of the houses. Hamish hailed him.

‘I’ve got a licence,’ said the man defiantly. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘I just want to know if you went to any of the outlying cottages on the day that man was murdered.’

‘Aye, I even went to that fellow’s cottage afore he was murdered.’